Why Edward Snowden won't be coming home anytime soon

Former U.S. National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appears live via video
during a student organized world affairs conference at the Upper
Canada College private high school in Toronto, February 2,
2015.REUTERS/Mark
Blinch

There's been a lot of talk this week about former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden potentially returning to the U.S.

“Snowden is
ready to return to the States, but on the condition that he is
given a guarantee of a legal and impartial trial,” Snowden's
Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherenasaid.

Ben Wizner, one of Snowden's American legal counsels,
told U.S. News that Snowden should get leniency like General
David Petraeus, the former CIA chief who this week agreed
to serve two years probation and plead guilty to one
misdemeanor.

“If Petraeus deserves exceptional treatment because of his
service to the nation, then surely the same exception should be
offered to Edward Snowden, whose actions have led to a historic
global debate that will strengthen free societies,” Wizner said.

However, there are clear reasons why Snowden would not be able to
strike a favorable deal and return home — or move
anywhere else outside of Russia.

The issue of Snowden's confinement center around the notion of a
"fair trial" as well as the leverage of Russian
President Vladimir Putin. The US government
reportedly charged the 31-year-old with three felonies, including
two under the World War I-era Espionage Act, after he stole
up to 1.77 million classified NSA documents and fled from
Hawaii to Hong Kong and eventually Moscow.

“The laws under which Snowden is charged don’t distinguish
between sharing information with the press in the public
interest, and selling secrets to a foreign enemy,” Wizner
said last May.

“The laws would not provide him any opportunity to say that
the information never should have been withheld from the public
in the first place," Wizner continued. "And the fact that the
disclosures have led to the highest journalism rewards, have led
to historic reforms in the US and around the world – all of that
would be irrelevant in a prosecution under the espionage laws in
the United States.”

Snowden gave an estimated
200,000 documents to journalists. Significantly, it's unclear
what happened to the rest of the information he is suspected to
have downloaded.

In October 2013, James Risen of
the Times reported the former CIA technician said (over
encrypted chat) that "he gave all of the classified documents he
had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong." (ACLU lawyer
and Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner subsequently told Business
Insider that the report was inaccurate.)

In May 2014, Snowden then
toldNBC's Brian Williams in Moscow that he "destroyed"
all documents in his possession while in Hong Kong.

Given that it's unknown what Snowden did with the
most sensitive documents he stole, any sort of clemency
or lenient plea deal doesn't seem to be a viable option right
now.

"It was
obviously prompted by Petraeus case, not by the Administration or
Snowden," Andrei Soldatov, a Russian
investigative journalist who co-wrote
the book on the FSB, told Business Insider in an
email. "And as [Snowden's camp and the
US government] have a stalemate, I don't see why it should be
changed if the news is not prompted by the change of position of
one of the sides."

"Just think of these paranoid guys — they're quite paranoid in
most cases," Soldatov told. "They might think, 'OK, we
worked with [Snowden] for many months and if he leaves the
country he will not be under our control. And the problem is that
now he might start leaking things not about the NSA but the FSB,
and how we treated him here.' That might be quite a natural
thought for the FSB."

The flag reads "For Putin.
And that's all."REUTERS/Denis
Sinyakov

Soldatov described how Kremlin security services do things in
steps, and he detailed how the FSB would likely want to have
handled Snowden after he
reached out to Moscow in Hong Kong.

"The first step is to get Snowden to Moscow," Soldatov said. "The
next step is to have him locked for 40 days [to decide what to
do] … The next step is to provide him asylum ... Then to say,
'Someone is looking for you, you are in danger.' … And then you
have the guy in a controlled environment, and then you can work
with him."

Consequently, Soldatov said, "Snowden made a great mistake when
he decided to go to Moscow."